Attachmate now owns Novell and therefore, by extension, also owns SUSE and openSUSE. With Oracle currently doing everything in its power to thoroughly destroy what's left of Sun's open source commitments, scepticism abound about the future of SUSE, and more specifically of openSUSE. Attachmate's CEO has answered some questions about the future of SUSE and openSUSE, and as far as words go, it's looking good.

Ok, so SP2 came out when? 2004.
SP3 came out in 2008, that meant Novell had 4 years to build a stable Client for Windows, and they couldn't do it. They had 3 years before that. They've had 3 years since and the Novell Client for XP still sucks.

Argue all you want, but they haven't changed it enough that it explains Novell's incompetence. once in 11 years (XP) is not a valid excuse.

Vista came out in 2006, and they haven't got it. Windows 7 came out 2 years ago, still haven't got it stable.

so that's 7 years for Xp to XP SP2, 3 years for SP3, 5 years for Vista and 2 for Win7.

Ok, so SP2 came out when? 2004.
SP3 came out in 2008, that meant Novell had 4 years to build a stable Client for Windows, and they couldn't do it. They had 3 years before that. They've had 3 years since and the Novell Client for XP still sucks.

Argue all you want, but they haven't changed it enough that it explains Novell's incompetence. once in 11 years (XP) is not a valid excuse.

Vista came out in 2006, and they haven't got it. Windows 7 came out 2 years ago, still haven't got it stable.

so that's 7 years for Xp to XP SP2, 3 years for SP3, 5 years for Vista and 2 for Win7.

Admit it, Novell sucks.

FYI - you're just looking at the known public updates to the API. Remember, there is also the Windows Update mechanism too and Microsoft does push a lot of updates out through there that they do not publicize. So as to subtle changes that can break a lot of things like eDirectory there is more than ample opportunity for ways in which Microsoft has been known to use to break GSSAPI on Novell.

Now, you could argue that some of those changes were not intentional as Microsoft does not have a very good track record of pushing out patches via Windows Update that always keeps a fix in place. All to often one patch will undo another patch, and they'll repatch in a third patch. (Several public examples of this throughout Microsoft's history - e.g. WMF security flaws).

So whether it was intentional or not, it has likely happened in ways that Novell or anyone other than Microsoft (and in some cases even Microsoft) can account for in order to release a stable add-on product - which is what eDirectory/GroupWise is for Windows.

This is not a matter of making excuses for Novell. It is a matter of simply pointing out the history and behavior of Microsoft - known anti-competitive behavior at that.